Saturday, November 26, 2005

With video and pictures, for those of you who still persist in believing the sack of Fallujah was a surgical strike against insurgents.

Of course, the Pentagon has now admitted the use of WP as an attack weapon in Fallujah – after lying about this for more than year – although they say that no civilians were deliberately targeted. But surely the main point of the entire scandal is that American forces knowingly used these chemical weapons in populated areas – a practice that was bound to kill civilians, whatever the tactical intention might have been. And since Monbiot notes that there were some 30,000 to 50,000 civilians in the city – which the Americans openly treated as a "free-fire zone," pretending that it was empty of non-combatants – it is difficult to see what his problem is exactly with the WP angle of story, beyond some disagreement with some of the Italian documentary's more subjective claims. For in the end, the basic facts seem clear, and Monbiot is in agreement with them: The Americans used white phosophorus and thermobaric weapons in areas teeming with civilians during the attack on Fallujah.